1877 The Year America Went on Strike: Railroads, Riots and Violence in the Streets

        It began on the railroad at Camden Junction on July 16, 1877 two miles from downtown Baltimore.

That morning railroad workers awoke to read in the newspaper that Baltimore and Ohio Railroad President John W. Garrett had authorized yet another wage cut while in the same breath he had told his Board of Trustees that the past year had been the most profitable year yet in the history of the railroad.

Over the past five years railroad workers across the United States had seen their wages cut by more than fifty percent.  Railroad management across the nation had ruthlessly spied on and smashed all attempts at unionization.  Now, many railroad workers and their families lived on the very edge of starvation.

That morning one brakeman on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Camden Junction stood up and said, “Enough!”

He refused to move his train.  Within minutes all trains set to leave Baltimore had been halted.  Workers refused to move.  They gathered spontaneously in crowds all along the tracks and shouted, “Strike!  Strike!  Strike!”

The police were summoned and rushed to the scene, but unsure of what to do or how to proceed, the cops simply stood by as the crowd of disgruntled railroad workers grew.  The trains stood idle and the protests became louder.

An entire day passed but eventually B & O Railroad President Garrett was able to gather around forty strikebreakers to commandeer the trains.  All of the would-be strikers were promptly fired.

Garrett believed that he had broken the strike and had smashed the protest but he couldn’t have been more wrong.  Word of the work stoppage had leaked out and moved further on down the line.  Within a matter of days railroad transport across the entire nation would grind to a halt as the strike spread.  

The Great Strike of 1877, the largest single labor uprising in American history, had only just begun.

In the year 1877 the United States was plagued by its first “Red Scare”.  Almost all business leaders in all industries at that time believed that any workers who attempted to unionize, protested a decrease in wages, or tried to improve working conditions in any way was in fact part of some secretive communist cabal that was intent on toppling management and undermining profits.

When referencing the railroad workers strike of that summer United States Secretary of the Navy Richard W. Thompson said of the strikers that they were, “(N)othing more than French communists so at war with the institutions of this nation that they had to be overcome at all costs.”

In the 19th century anyone in America perceived to have Marxist leanings was typically accused of being French in reference to the 1871 Paris Commune when communists had temporarily taken over the running of the city of Paris in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War.

During the 1870’s the United States was suffering through the worst economic downturn in its history to date, a depression so bad that it would not be equaled again until the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression of the 1930’s. 

Business leaders at the time were using these bad economic conditions as an excuse to cut wages and maximize profits knowing full well that workers out of desperation would suffer almost any indginity imaginable just to keep their jobs.

In July of 1877 it all came crashing down, albeit temporarily, when railroad workers across the United States stood up and finally said, “Enough!”

By the time all was said and done The Great Strike of 1877 would lead to civil unrest and work stoppages in city after city from coast to coast.  In all, at some point during the summer of 1877, over half a million Americans employed in all industries would go out on strike,  In many instances the response of state and federal government officials was swift and brutal, but the strikes would continue nonetheless.

It was the railroad workers who led the charge.

        In 1877 the railroad was the largest single employer in the United States with over 200,000 workers on its payroll.  American railroads at the time were owned by fifty-five separate companies responsible for seventy-nine thousand miles of track and five billion dollars in revenue.

American leaders considered work stoppages on the railroads to be a threat to the entire American transportation system and a crippling blow to the nation’s infrastructure.  On many occasions President Rutherford B. Hayes deployed federal troops and military force to break the strike and force Americans back to work.

In Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Railroad on July 19, 1877 flagman Gus Harris refused to work on a double header.  A double header was a term for a larger train hauled by two engines which was highly dangerous and prone to derailment and fatalities but cost the railroad fewer workers and less money to operate.  The strike started by Harris in Pittsburgh quickly spread and soon nearly all industry in the city stopped as the railroad workers were joined by men from Pittsburgh’s iron mills who also walked out citing dangerous working conditions that killed dozens of their coworkers each month.

Local police refused to act against their fellow citizens and the crowd of striking workers continued to grow all across the city.  Soon, Pennsylvania Governor John F. Hartranft called in the National Guard from Philadelphia.

The troops from Philadelphia launched a bayonet charge against the striking workers of Pittsburgh.  The strikers, armed with revolvers and hunting rifles, fired back at the charging Guardsmen and a citywide riot erupted.  

Fighting between the National Guard and armed workers continued throughout Pittsburgh for over two days.  Striking workers torched a building where soldiers were stationed burning some alive where they slept and federal troops were deployed to the city.  Gatling guns and rapid fire rifles were used against the workers of Pittsburgh and perhaps upwards of a hundred people died during the week of insurrection before United States Army Cavalry troops, with an overwhelming show of force, were able to quell the violence.

        By the end of July general railroad strikes had spread to almost every major city in the United States requiring the deployment of tens of thousands of federal troops across the country just to maintain order since local militia and police were either unwilling, or unable, to effectively act against the striking workers.

By the end of the summer the strikes had dissipated for two primary reasons.  Firstly, unlike local police or militia, federal troops most of whom were veterans of the Civil War and wars on the American frontier did not run or break in the face of violent and angry crowds, but instead followed orders and had no compunctions about using deadly force against their fellow citizens if need be.

And secondly the strikes ended abruptly because unlike business leaders feared and suspected at the time, The Great Strike of 1877 was not an organized movement or part of some greater communist conspiracy, but rather, it was a spontaneous reaction to inhumane working conditions and nearly slave wages.  The strikers lacked any centralized leadership because without the ability to unionize workers at the time had no way to establish universal and attainable goals or effectively communicate with one another without interference from management.

At their peak it is estimated that almost half a million workers participated in The Great Strikes of July 1877.  Over 1,000 strikers were jailed for their participation in the Great Strike of 1877 and perhaps as many as 250 were killed in clashes with police and federal troops.  During the last week of July of 1877 it is estimated that nearly half of the nation’s freight came to halt and the cities of Pittsburgh, Baltimore, St. Louis and Chicago were all ravaged by uncontrollable fires as a result of fighting and rioting that took hold of those cities during the peak of the nationwide strike.

        In the wake of The Great Strike of 1877 American business leaders were so frightened by what had happened that the civil unrest generated by the strikes was rarely mentioned publicly in the press.  Though some political leaders did hint at the possibility of labor reform, little to nothing was actually done to either improve wages or working conditions in the United States as a result of The Great Strike of 1877.

It seemed as if, after having fought a brutal and bloody Civil War only a decade before, and after having witnessed once again the spectacle of combat between federal troops and American citizens in the streets of major cities, that most Americans simply did not want to deal with the potential anger and unrest that could result from demanding improvements in labor.  By the end of the decade The Great Strike of 1877 was largely forgotten and rarely mentioned or written about.  

Until the spread of worker’s unions and organized labor in the 20th century industrialists and business capitalists would continue to get richer and richer on the backs of American working men and women.  Even children would continue to work in American factories and on American railroads for decades under deadly and dehumanizing conditions before any substantive change was made to improve the plight of working Americans.

It could be argued that The Great Strike of 1877 was nothing but a great failure when it came to advancing the rights of workers and improving their wages, but perhaps without those brave souls on the railroad who stood up for themselves for one brief shining moment so long ago in the summer of 1877 and said, “Enough!” today, maybe, all of our children in the United States would still be working for slave wages in inhumane conditions, the victims of ruthless and unscrupulous business leaders.